Judgeability concerns: The interplay of information, applicability, and accountability in the overattribution bias.

In 3 studies, the authors examined the impact of judgeability concerns in the overattribution bias (OAB; G. A. Quattrone, 1982) by manipulating the presence-absence of a constrained essay, the participants' accountability, and the applicability of the available information. A constrained essay was neither necessary nor sufficient to anchor a judgment. When no essay was circulated, no OAB occurred in the cases of accountability or of inapplicability (Studies 1 and 2). When the essay was provided, however, both accountability and inapplicability were needed to eliminate the OAB (Studies 2 and 3). These findings did not result from conversational rules or demand characteristics. They illustrate that people control the expression of a judgment made under uncertainty; people express the judgment to the extent they feel entitled to do so. The results arc discussed in the wider context of current multistage models of the dispositional inference process. Three centuries ago, La Rochefoucauld pointed at a striking contradiction. Ironically, the French moralist noticed that "everyone complains about his memory, but no one complains about his judgment " (1665/1987, p. 58). Far from being limited to La Rochefoucauld's contemporaries, this aphorism anticipated one of